October 25, 2013
This guest post was written by Dirk Voorhoof* The European Court’s judgment of 10 October 2013 in Delfi AS v. Estonia has caused a lot of controversy in the world of online media, news portals, internet-groups and freedom of expression websites. Especially the criticism by Article 19, Index on Censorship and The Guardian (amongst others, […]
October 21, 2013
The Strasbourg Court has recently delivered its first judgment on the topic of HIV-based employment discrimination. I.B. v. Greece (judgment in French!) concerns a man who is HIV-positive and who was fired from his job, because his employer wished to keep the company running smoothly. What happened was that a group of I.B.’s co-workers, finding […]
October 11, 2013
This guest post was written by Yousra Benfquih* In the case of Epistatu v. Romania of 24 September 2013 before the European Court of Human Rights, the applicant, Mr. Cristian Epistatu, a Romanian national and final-year high-school student born in 1990, was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment by a judgment of 12 […]
October 07, 2013
This guest post was written by Ronan Ó Fathaigh* and Dirk Voorhoof** Nine years ago, in its landmark Cumpănă and Mazăre v. Romania judgment, a unanimous Grand Chamber laid down a rare absolute rule that prison sentences for defamation are never justified under Article 10 where the defamatory statements concern a matter of public interest. This […]
August 22, 2013
I am very pleased to announce the publication of my article ‘Conflicts between Absolute Rights: A Reply to Steven Greer’ in the latest issue of Human Rights Law Review. The article can be found here. This is the abstract: Can absolute rights conflict? Is it permissible to torture a person to save others from torture? […]
August 07, 2013
This guest post was written by Judit Geller and Dezideriu Gergely, European Roma Rights Centre. In the case of Vona v Hungary, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) openly stood up against racism and hatred when it ruled that if an association’s activities amounts to widespread racist intimidation of a group then the association […]
August 01, 2013
This week, in a divided ruling, the Court rejected the case of Berisha v. Switzerland. By four votes to three, the Court held that the refusal of residence permits to the applicants’ three children – who were born in Kosovo and entered Switzerland illegally – did not violate the parents’ right to respect for family […]
July 23, 2013
This guest post was written by Bella Murati, Ph.D. Candidate at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. July 2013 marks the 18th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when in the period of 13-19 July 1995, more than 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslims were deliberately killed by Bosnian Serb forces. The case itself has been […]
July 17, 2013
Reading Strasbourg case-law on a systematic basis, I always feel uncomfortable when I see the Court’s expansive protection in the field of Article 1 Protocol 1. Basically, that is because I don’t really like the idea of a human right to property for a number of reasons. Firstly, a right to property takes the present […]
July 08, 2013
This post is written by Dirk Voorhoof, Ghent University.* In its judgment of 25 June 2013 in the case of Youth Initiative for Human Rights v. Serbia the European Court of Human Rights has recognised more explicitly than ever before the right of access to documents held by public authorities, based on Article 10 of […]
July 04, 2013
Recently, Judges De Gaetano and Ziemele did not hide their bewilderment with the Latvian government’s argument in favor of the application of the ‘significant disadvantage’ admissibility criterion in the case of Bannikov v. Latvia.
June 26, 2013
This guest post was written by Daria Sartori, Ph.D candidate in Criminal Law at Trento University (Italy). She is interested in the relationship between Criminal Law and Human Rights, and she is presently working in Italy and abroad on a research project about the Principle of Legality and the European Convention on Human Rights. Gross […]
June 17, 2013
In this post I want to flag three inadmissibility decisions, delivered by the Court’s Chambers over the past few months, in which the applicant’s claims are declared manifestly ill-founded, by a majority. Like so many inadmissibility decisions, the three summarised below may have easily passed under the radar of many of our readers. These particular […]
June 10, 2013
This guest post was written by Ingrid Leijten, Ph.D. researcher and teaching assistant at the Leiden University Faculty of Law, Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. The debate on the future of the European Court of Human Rights is often phrased in terms of the individual justice/constitutional justice dichotomy. In the recent case of N.K.M. […]
May 30, 2013
When systematically reading the Court’s case-law, it becomes clear that poor conditions of detention remain one of the most dramatic human rights problems in contemporary Europe. The last decade, the Court has done a good job in interpreting Article 3 ECHR as to include a right for prisoners to be held in decent detention conditions. […]
May 24, 2013
Fellow observers of the Strasbourg case law will probably agree with me: when you systematically go through the Court’s case law you’re confronted with the most extraordinary facts that you would never have imagined. Horrible prison circumstances, ill-treatment and torture are sometimes described into utmost details. One can also not remain untouched by cases concerning […]
May 15, 2013
Eva Brems and I are happy to announce the publication of our article entitled “Doing Minority Justice Through Procedural Fairness: Face Veil Bans in Europe” in the Journal of Muslims in Europe. In this article we examine the bans on face veils (better known as ‘Burqa bans’) from a procedural justice perspective. This piece also […]
May 01, 2013
The structured proportionality test, as utilised by the German Constitutional Court (among others) and championed by Robert Alexy and his followers, subjects limitations of fundamental rights to a three-pronged test. The test is intended to examine – step by step – a measure’s (i) suitability, (ii) necessity and (iii) proportionality stricto sensu. Correct application of […]
April 24, 2013
This guest post was written by Ronan Ó Fathaigh* On Monday, the Grand Chamber of the European Court held, by nine votes to eight, that the UK’s ban on political advertising on television did not violate Article 10. The majority opinion in Animal Defenders International v. the United Kingdom departed substantially from the Court’s previous […]
April 09, 2013
This guest post was written by Cedric De Koker, academic assistant at the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP), Ghent University. With its judgment in the case of Gülay Çetin v. Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) added another chapter to its significant body of detention-related case law. Having to pronounce […]